Paths to Innovation in Supply Chains: The Landscape of Future Research

This chapter presents a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for supply chain and it is the result of an intensive work jointly performed involving a wide network of stakeholders from discrete manufacturing, process industry and logistics sector to put forward a vision to strengthen European Supply Chains for the next decade. The work is based on matching visions from literature and from experts with several iterations between desk research and workshops, focus groups and interviews. The result is a detailed analysis of the supply chain strategies identified as most relevant for the next years and definition of the related research and innovation topics as future developments and steps for the full implementation of the strategies, thus proposing innovative and cutting-edge actions to be implemented based on technological development and organisational change

Bringing Managers Back into Stakeholder Theory: The Role of Practical Wisdom and Moral Agency

Extant literature presents two perspectives on how managers balance competing stakeholder interests. One points to norm-based and organization-specific general approaches, another to managers’ own perceptions and motives. Utilizing a strategy-as-practice lens and relying on mixed-methods, we inductively investigate the interplay between organizations’ general approaches to stakeholder management and managers’ situation-specific balancing. Based on data from Dutch nonprofits, we develop a theoretical model highlighting practical wisdom and moral agency as central for explaining this interplay. We contribute to the stakeholder literature by challenging the view of managers as mere conduits of organizational approaches and revealing new mechanisms of variation and change

Transferring Routines Across Multiple Boundaries: A Flexible Approach

We currently know little about how transferring can be accomplished when source- and target environments only have little in common. This chapter utilizes the case of EuroCo and AsiaCo to account for how a transfer of interrelated routines across multiple boundaries unfolds. A pragmatic and flexible approach to transferring, where coordinating actors attended to replication and adaptation as means rather than ends, is illuminated. Notably, coordinators split their work into smaller chunks by focusing on artifacts, people, and actions. As pressures to progress the transfer increased, they conceived of new ideas for performances and put the ideas to use along three trajectories focused on embedding, embodying, and enacting routines. Eventually, they blended performances from each trajectory back together into a new overarching notion of what was to be transferred. In elaborating on and discussing these findings, the chapter contributes to literature on routine transfer. Boundary conditions and avenues for future research are discussed